After a year of fumbling our way through various efforts to produce an environmental history mobile application for iOS, Jim Clifford and I are finally ready to demo Environmental History Mobile 1.0 Beta. As we mentioned in our previous update, the goal of this project was to create an iOS mobile application that would facilitate the dissemination of online content relevant to the environmental history community, including news, blogs, and podcasts. What you can try out below is a demo of our first attempt to aggregate all of that content into a simple application.

Please keep in mind that not all of the components of the application in the web demo will function properly, as it would on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Nevertheless, you can click through most of the different sections of the application, including:

EH Top News

This top button on our first tab is our attempt to aggregate environmental history news sources and blogs from across the web. We created a new website, http://envhist.com as a way to bring together content from a collection of relevant blogs and other online sources of environmental history content. We are currently looking for content for this section of the app and we invite all environmental history bloggers to contact us about adding their RSS feeds to http://envhist.com.

EH Tweets

Twitter has rapidly grown into one the best channels for environmental history content on the web. A large community of #twitterstorians have coalesced around the hashtag #envhist as real-time tool for sharing links and discussing environmental history matters on Twitter. Wilko von Hardenberg recently posted this visualization of #envhist activity on Twitter. To tap into this active and ongoing online conversation, we’ve added this button to take you directly to a stream of tweets with the #envhist tag (unfortunately, this button currently doesn’t work on the web demo).

NiCHE News

To keep users in the loop on all NiCHE activites, we’ve added a feed of all NiCHE news and annoucements.

H-Environment

The H-Environment email listserv continues to be an active source of news, announcements, and occasionally debates about environmental history. This feed keeps an updated list of the last twenty posts to H-Environment.

EHTV

NiCHE’s web video series EHTV has published ten short web documentaries about environmental history research. This button takes you to links to watch all of these videos in the app.

The remaining tabs take you to posts from The Otter and episodes of Nature’s Past. Take and look and have fun. Post your feedback in the comments section below.

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2 thoughts on “EH Mobile App Demo”

Great start. This is probably jumping the gun, but do you envision users being able to add feeds, etc. to the app from within the app by the user (i.e., a la RSS Reader, FlipBoard) … may have been mentioned in this post or another post …

Overall, I think you have made great strides for the EH community with this app. Thanks.

Thanks, Richard. We decided not to include an option to add custom feeds to the app for a couple of reasons. First, we thought that there are some pretty great feed reader applications out there already (Pulse, Flipboard, etc…). We just can’t compete with that. Second, we wanted the content on the app to be curated to some extent so that all users were viewing the same content together. To bring user input into what gets into the app, we included the #envhist tag page and we created http://envhist.com for the EH Top News button. This way, any user can submit content to the app and every user will see that content.

On another note, if we see enough interest in this iOS version of the app, we can create an Android version too. That will, however, take some time. We’ll see how it goes with this one first.